Education in the Anthropocene
Education in the Anthropocene necessitates a specific pedagogy that provides opportunities for learning to engage culturally with ecology and ensure sustainable development. We now have to acknowledge that humanity exists in a more-than-human world where all life forms have coevolved within zero waste ecologies of circularity. The circularity of balanced ecosystems contrasts with the linearity of mass production, which accumulates waste. The transition of linear economies to circular ones is central to a syllabus of radical hope. The educational aim is to understand how the nonhuman and material worlds co-shape our mutual worlds. In particular, education in the Anthropocene needs to be interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, cross-disciplinary, intersectional, ecofeminist, posthumanist, indigenous, and participatory with regards race and ethnicity. This is the complex learning framework of cultural ecology, a branch of applied anthropology that encompasses discard studies, Systems thinking about culture and ecology brings conservation management to the centre of curricula at all levels of education.